The Smell of the Town
A woman said to me to-day: “You’ll get the smell o’ the town blowed off you in the Donegal hills!”
Glengesh
Darkness and austerity—those are the notes I carry away from this wild glen. Its lines have something of the splendid bareness of early architecture; its colour suggests time-stained walls, with quiet aisles and mouldering altars where one might kneel and dream away an existence. When you meet a stranger going the road that winds through it, like a coil of incense suspended in mid-air, you expect him to look at you out of eyes full of wonder, and to speak to you in half-chanted and serious words, stopping not, turning neither to left nor to right, but faring on, a symbol of pilgrimage:
Le solus a chroidhe,
Fann agus tuirseach
Go deireadh a shlighe.